WaPo | It was disarming to hear the most powerful man in the world speak of powerlessness.
“You
know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have
been my son,” the president said. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon
Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
Obama noted that “the African American community is looking at
this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go
away,” then narrowed his focus once again to the personal. I quote the
next passage at length because, for me, it is the heart of the speech:
“There
are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the
experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department
store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who
haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the
locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I
was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the
experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse
nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”
I’m not sure I know an African American man who hasn’t
had these experiences. What’s new is the idea that the president of the
United States knows what it feels like to be eyed warily, to be presumed
guilty of malicious intent. That gets your attention.
Obama went
on to explain why, in his view, Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal
had such tremendous impact for black Americans. African Americans are
not naive, he said; we know that young black men are “disproportionately
both victims and perpetrators of violence.” But it is not making
excuses for bad conduct to recognize that the pathology seen in many
poor black communities has a historical context. Refusing to acknowledge
this context, Obama noted, “adds to the frustration” that many African
Americans feel.
“There is a history of racial disparities in the
application of our criminal laws,” Obama said. He might have gone
further and noted that nowhere will you find citizens more supportive of
tough law-and-order policies than in poor, high-crime neighborhoods.
But law-abiding citizens want those policies applied fairly — and know
that often they are not.
There is “a sense that if a white male
teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to
bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.”
Here the president was guilty of understatement; most of us don’t have
“a sense” that things would be different, we’d bet the ranch on it.
